Its been a while since I last played but there was very little minecraft style ore searching and that was on a railworld setup, which has fewer but richer ore p

Its been a while since I last played but there was very little minecraft style ore searching and that was on a railworld setup, which has fewer but richer ore patches. Part of that may have been the radars I put down whenever I placed defensive turrets, not only do they scan the map for you but they give you mapsight (when you zoom in enough it stops being a symbolic representation and starts being game graphics). Its very helpful for telling if a biter attack is serious or referencing a layout on the other side of your factory that you want to repeat, and I think its nicer that the map scanning occurs almost as a side effect of that immediate tangible benefit. You can also muck with the world generation and make patches much richer and much more frequent. And I don't mean that like 'you can turn the difficulty down', its really more like increasing or decreasing emphasis on an aspect of the game to suit your preferences. I have felt what you express about minecraft so I wanted to chip in my 2c, because it would be a shame if you missed out on factorio due to weird mapgen or the like.